- Steve Jobs (1955 – 2011), Stanford Commencement Address (2005)
Posted in Business, Quotes, Technology
How are entrepreneurs built? Lots of conversations, free pizza, encouragement and brainstorming.
Sarah and I attended ENTER’s event this evening at Harvard College. Hosted by Bilal Zuberi of General Catalyst Partners, there was a great panel of players in the Boston community. Brent Hurley, WaiKit Lau and Joe Chung shared war stories from Paypal, YouTube, ScanScout and ATG while Murat Bicer from Battery Ventures added venture color.
Participants ranged from freshmen who had just taken their first CS class at Harvard, to recent grads Ho Tuan and Nicholas Krasney (Harvard, ’09) who were launching a cable service on campus. (If you’re at Harvard, check out their beta.)
Having “grown up” in Silicon Valley, I often take for granted the idea that startups are a valid and natural path out of undergrad. This is definitely not the case at Harvard. Despite the play that entrepreneurship gets in the media nowadays, from President Obama’s Startup America initiative (which oddly sounds like some sort of political action committee) to the stardom of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, the world of entrepreneurship and startups is largely opaque to the general public. It conjures up the notion of two unwashed guys in a garage somewhere, eating ramen and coding their eyeballs out. Hardly an attractive picture when compared to the glossy brochures of McKinsey and Goldman Sachs!
While the garage startup still exists, much of the entrepreneurship community I interact with is made up of people who are simply passionate about solving a certain problem they’ve identified. They seek guidance on how best to build their solution, how to find a co-founder, when to approach institutional financing and even just to commiserate with fellow startup junkies to share the joys and despairs of running your own show. Shout out to some of my favorite entrepreneurs: Check out Katrina Lake on the intersection of fashion and the internet, Elizabeth Yin on validating markets without coding, Eric Bahn on anything related to GMATs or business school.
Gatherings like the one last night are a small but essential part of building a vibrant, thriving community and ecosystem.
HBS folks – Startup Tribe is meeting tonight in the game room of the Grille.
Yesterday in my supply chains class, we had a guest who said in the starkest terms I’ve heard at HBS:
“Don’t just think about earning top dollar -if you live a life of service to your communities, and do what you’re passionate about, the money will come.”
And he paraphrased Luke 12:48 “For those whom much is given, much is expected”, and told us that we had an obligation to those who were not as fortunate as we were, to give back.
In an environment where we discuss efficiency, and corporate accountability in the context of not getting arrested, it was refreshing to hear a CEO of a small, family-owned business articulate the values which governed his life.
It raises interesting questions for how one should live a life of service, even if not directly engaged in a social mission. We can’t all be Paul Farmer, or Wendy Kopp, but I have to believe that we can pursue our career aspirations while being engaged and contributing community members. We can make the places we inhabit better for us being there, beyond our immediate self-enrichment and nuclear families. We can think about the things we didn’t earn in our lives, that just happened to us, and be humbled in that knowledge.
Posted in Community, HBSLearnings
Watched two videos today that I thought would be worth sharing.
In the first, author Chimamanda Adichie highlights the dangers of a single story. How the story of Africa that the Western world tells itself is one of poverty, endless war, and HIV-Aids. (like Singapore = chewing gum ban, extreme cleanliness, and caning that American kid)
She touches on the role of power in deciding how stories are told -
“It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power…stories too are defined by the principle of nkali (power) . How they are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power.
Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story, and to start with, “secondly.” Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have and entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.”
In the second video, Jon Stewart addresses a crowd of ~200,000 at the Rally to Restore Sanity, and though he doesn’t blame the tellers of the stories for the underlying problems the US faces, he urges the listeners to reject the notion of a single story. Adichie could have been channeling Stewart (or vice versa)
Stewart:
“We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is — on the brink of catastrophe — torn by polarizing hate and how it’s a shame that we can’t work together to get things done, but the truth is we do. We work together to get things done every damn day. The only place we don’t is here or on cable TV. Americans don’t live here or on cable TV. Where we live our values and principles form the foundation that sustains us while we get things done, not the barriers that prevent us from getting things done.
Most Americans don’t live their lives solely as Democrats or Republicans or conservatives or liberals. Most Americans live their lives that our just a little bit late for something they have to do. Often it’s something they do not want to do, but they do it. Impossible things get done every day that are only made possible by the little, reasonable compromises.”
Adichie:
“to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience, and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes. And the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. “
So here’s to working on listening better and more thoughtfully for the stories people tell about themselves and their businesses.
“When we eat together, when we set out to do so deliberately, life is better, no matter what your circumstances.”
– Thomas Keller-
In that spirit, we (@dillardsarah, @ huwjedwards and I) are inaugurating our first chain letter dinner party.
Idea: There are collections of people you don’t know very well, but think are interesting. You think they could be particularly interesting at a dinner party. You invite them, and ask them to invite another person (under the same arms length criteria), and that invitee in turn gets to invite one more person.
Expected outcomes: Probably largely dependent on the first invitee and the extent to which they embrace the spirit of the exercise. Could be a total disaster given large potential variance, but I’m optimistic that it will be a lot of fun. And when in doubt, just add wine and everything will be better =).
Will update with results.
“FLOW is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.“
It is the intersection of high skill level and high challenge level.
We all know the feeling of being in the flow – athletes call it the zone, sometimes we experience it at work, in a presentation, in class, where you are just ON.
Why is this important? Because recruiting season is starting (yes, in the first full week of school, there was already a recruiting networking event for 2nd year MBA students) and this is a time fraught with anxiety, much frenetic rushing about as we try to figure out what to do after leaving the warm cocoon of HBS.
We stop thinking about being in the Flow, and start worrying about landing an interview, getting a job, thinking about LIFE with a capital “L”.
Now I know there are two, maybe more schools of thought about work – live to work or work to live, and I’m probably much more in the former camp – I want to like what I’m doing, and who I’m working with. That doesn’t seem like a big insight – but I think it’s taken a number of jobs and lots of conversations to figure out what kinds of work/challenges make me excited, keep me engaged, and encourage me to give my best everyday. I enjoy being surrounded by people who love what they’re doing – who aren’t just showing up to collect a paycheck, and who are passionate about the things they do everyday.
There is a lot of temptation to put off the things you love, to be sensible and do the right, safe thing – after all, we’ve been taught to assess the risks and rewards of our decisions, but often, we look too narrowly at compensation and fail to value the psychic rewards of being truly engaged and energized by our work. We did a case on Lehman’s research department in the 1990s, where analysts stayed at Lehman, were paid less than the competition (GS, ML) and outperformed them on II rankings. They called it the “Rivkin discount”, what people were willing to take to work for Jack Rivkin and be part of the team. He managed to build a team that was able to deliver results while having fun, even within a traditional stodgy firm like Lehman. Perhaps there are two messages – people are ok being paid less if you give them more than just money. If all you offer is money, you’d better be offering more than the competition.
This brings us to AMP – Daniel Pink’s work on what intrinsically motivates people: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.
Autonomy: People want to have control over their work.
Mastery: People want to get better at what they do.
Purpose: People want to be part of something that is bigger than they are.
When you take these three things away from people, you better have a hell of a lot of extrinsic/monetary compensation/fear to drive performance. Recipe for unhappy employees – Remove choice, don’t give them feedback, and make the work they do seem utterly meaningless. This is what people gripe about when they talk about “the Man”, “being a cog/suit/number”. Sound familiar?
So as I sign up for info sessions and coffee chats, I have to keep asking myself if these potential employers are going to offer me the chance to be in the FLOW, to exercise autonomy, to provide constructive feedback, and most importantly, the chance to believe in the enterprise and what we are trying to accomplish together.
I see many of these characteristics in startups, which are autonomous by default since there’s always too much work for anyone to really have time to supervise you, and where if you don’t master what you’re doing, you will be killed by the market, and where there is a built in purpose as you’re part of a team that’s trying to survive.
I’m curious about how to retain this sense of shared purpose as organizations scale and mature. I know there must be large companies who have accomplished this. Anyone know of companies that have done this particularly well over a sustained period of time?
Posted in Business, Community, HBSLearnings
I got a lot of great feedback on yesterday’s post about the 5 questions one should ask before taking a job – and questions on what I was doing for the summer, and whether I’d followed my own advice.
I’m spending the summer at Okta, an enterprise software startup based in San Francisco, founded by a team of cloud veterans from salesforce.com, SuccessFactors and Rearden Commerce. Our initial product is the Cloud Application Network, focused on solving the cloud identity problem. More on the problem here.
I believe deeply in the importance of playing for the right team, and spending the time to figure out whether the team is right for you. In the case of a startup, especially an early-stage company, people are everything, from the management, to the investors. I was referred to Okta by a friend who vouched for the principals and the investors. I did some of my own homework, starting with the basics:
1. LinkedIn – checking out management’s backgrounds, and recommendations
2. Unvarnished – currently in private beta but could evolve into a great tool for recruiting
3. Good old Google – reading blog posts the principals have written to get a sense of their thinking
4. Personal calls – talked with people I trusted who had interacted with some of the management team
The calls and diligence all came back positive, so the next step is meeting and talking to folks at the company. My conversations with Frederic Kerrest and Roger Goulart gave me further confidence that these were people I could learn a ton from, and who were open to being both colleagues and mentors. They challenged me to articulate how I viewed the business and the market opportunity and laid out their expectations and ideas for how I could spend my summer productively not just for the firm, but for me. (Let’s be clear here though, fellow summer interns – it’s our job to be useful, not our employers’ job to entertain us!)
When we think about investors, people are often satisfied with brand name firms, but just as important is the partner who is directly involved and responsible for the investment. Andreessen Horowitz is a great firm that has made a number of interesting investments, but I’m super psyched that Ben Horowitz is on the Board – as founder and CEO of LoudCloud/Opsware, he is “considered somewhat of a domain expert in all things “cloud.” This isn’t just an investment because the space is “hot”, but by someone who has seen a wide range of cloud-related startups, and who lived and breathed the space as a manager.
“How can I make you successful? What can I do to help?”
5 weeks in, those are the sentences that I hear more often than any other (excluding variants of “Have you thought about how you’re managing your cloud applications?”) and to me they embody the ideas of a) leadership as service; and b) we can only be successful if we make our customers successful. This is a group of thoughtful, dedicated individuals committed to building a great product and successful company. I am lucky to be here. I am learning a ton, having a lot of fun, and am ready to sell a Cloud Application Network to anyone who wants one! (I can be reached at skoh at okta dot com)
Final thoughts:
Ben Horowitz writes
Every startup is in a furious race against time. The startup must find the product-market fit that leads to a great business and substantially take the market before running out of cash. As a result, the top two priorities are always to:
I believe in Todd‘s vision of the kind of company we’re building. We are here to build a long-lasting, successful company with a great product, big market to go after, seasoned team, and plenty of powder in the keg.
P.S. We’re hiring.
Posted in Business, cloud, Jobs, okta, Technology
In business school, and throughout the course of my career, I run into a lot of people looking for jobs, considering offers, making decisions about which job to take. People often worry about the position – “will it be interesting?”, the company’s prospects – “is it hot/prestigious/successful enough?” , their compensation- “I just want to get paid”, their title, etc. While those are worthy considerations, I always ask about the people :
1. Did you meet the team you would be working with AND for?
2. Do you think they are people you can learn from?
3. Are your potential supervisor (person) and future employer (organization) going to be invested in your growth and development?
4. Are these people you feel good about working with day in and day out? Do you trust them?
5. How focused are they on value creation? Are they marking time and collecting a paycheck, or are they all on the same page about the value they want to deliver every day?
I’ve found these 5 questions to be helpful in both large and small company settings, established or startup-businesses. Jobs aren’t about companies, or paychecks – they’re about people that you see everyday, spend more of your waking moments with than your loved ones, so it’s vitally important that you play for the right team. People who’ve got your back, who won’t waste your time with petty politics or passive- aggressiveness, and who you feel comfortable being your fullest self with because that’s how you can be successful at your job. And when you are with a team that allows you to be successful, you will find yourself learning, smiling, getting paid and generally kicking ass!
Questions 5 is a tough one to figure out, especially in the context of professional services, because there seem to be a lot of people who enjoy competing, and winning, and they will work hard to win you over at the expense of their competitors, but I’ve found that liking to win does not necessarily equate to believing in value creation.
So take the time to talk to people at the company. Do some back channel diligence on the principals. Are they good leaders and mentors? Were they good followers? How do they react to conflict?
What are some other questions folks have found helpful when deciding on job opportunities?
On Friday, Dr. Goh Keng Swee passed away. He had served Singapore as Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Defense, Education, Finance, as well as at the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC) and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).
From Dr. Goh’s final speech in office:
“To the New Guards soon joining us, may I say this: Welcome to you. Some of you will discover before long that you have joined a Holy Order that expects total commitment from you. That will be your moment of truth. You will then regard the present condition of the Republic not as a pinnacle of achievement but as a base from which to scale new heights.”
I have nothing but respect for the old guard of civil servants who built modern Singapore – To my friends who do the daily hard work of government, thank you. You make me believe in the Platonic ideal of a Republic even as I worry about it’s unstable equilibrium, and the dangers of complacency.
Posted in Singapore
Our very sarcastic Finance professor’s parting words of wisdom – Enjoy!
1. Exercise everyday
2. Get lots of sunshine (take Vitamin D)
3. Plan regular time with family and friends
4. Seek daily/regular satisfaction in your work
5. Live close to work (commuting empirically leads to unhappiness)
6. From WB: Be fearful when others are greedy, greedy when others are fearful (just to not sound too squishy)
Posted in HBSLearnings
